A little liquid Nitrogen and Intel’s newest chip running at almost double speed.

Intel’s Broadwell-E chip is already getting a workout.

Overclockers from around the world are at Taiwan’s Computex trade show to see just how fast they can push it.

“We’re always happy if we get new CPUs, new toys to play with.”

The chip has 10 individual processing cores, that’s two more than current high-end processors, so hopes are high.

“With the addition of two extra cores on this high-end flagship model, normally we should break all the records because we have two cores more that can calculate all the stuff.”

To get the chip to run faster than it’s supposed to, overclockers use a combination of software tweaks and liquid nitrogen cooling to prevent overheating.

It’s a delicate process.

Cool it too much and the chip might shut down, but leave it too warm and you won’t be getting every last bit of performance from it.

So that’s why Roman Hartung, an overclocker from Germany, was jugling liquid Nitrogen and a heatgun to keep the chip at optimum performance.

“The Core i7 6950X at 3GHz, and currntly it’s running at 5.2.”

And he’s had it running as fast as 5.7GHz - almost double the advertised speed. In fact, he says in his testing the new Broadwell chips are already outperforming the previous Haswell-E gaming chips, even though they ran faster speeds.

“Even with 500MHz less, the performance is better. This means the efficiency training they did is quite good.”

And that’s good news for gamers who want the new chips to run high-resolution 4K games as smoothly as possible.

All this comes at a price though. The 10-core Broadwell-E that was being overclocked here is $1723.